The Future belongs to Mailbug

Following on from my post about handheld wifi radio and how great I find it to be to have this single-purpose device, instead of having web radio bundled up together with everything else in my laptop…

Do you already know about Mailbug?

Mailbug is one of the few remaining that I have seen internet appliance category electronics that appears to be still in business (Mailstation seems to have been a similar but now defunct device). Except, it doesn’t technically access the “internet,” only email (to be more accurate, these are probably therefore email appliances? and no, I don’t mean smart fridges – which I passionately hate), and it does it by connecting to your phone line on this smart-looking little device that gives me strange feelings of old-timey nostalgia, naivete, and technological desire:

I’ve had for a few years an Alphasmart Neo 2 keyboard word processor thingy and I LOVE IT. It’s one of the best tech devices I’ve ever used, and if your purpose is simply just to write, it is unbelievably good and straightforward.

I’m liking more and more this idea of single purpose devices as containers of not only functionality, but focal points for habits. If I want to listen to something, I now fire up my handheld wifi radio. If I want to connect with people, I fire up my Mailbug.

Or at least I would if I could connect to Slack, Signal, and use my existing email address instead of their @mailbug.com domain. I’d also rather have it work over wifi, so that I don’t also need to pay their (totally reasonable) $15/mo subscription fee.

I think they are probably really tuned into the niche they seem to be mostly serving, of seniors who don’t want to be bothered with other types of computer tech. But I suspect I am not alone in my increasingly recalcitrant stance to a lot of technology and the habits and patterns they trap us into. I think one big way we can break out of that is by “containerizing” functionality into external devices. I think it’s high time a next generation internet appliance appeared on the scene to serve the burned out techlash generation, and Mailbug with its established technology seems oddly poised to push into this space and make a big splash.

There was a splashy article in NYT recently about a reporter who underwent the ‘torture’ of switching from a smartphone to a flip phone – for a month. And who said it was ‘totally worth it,’ presumably after they switched back. Well, I can say as someone who has never had a smart phone, and spent 10+ years without even a flip phone (which I only grudgingly got for emergencies, and leave in my car), a longer experience is also highly worth it.

Mentioned in a related light in the NYT piece above is the Light Phone, though I stumbled across it separately while researching the small but growing field of e-ink displays. Here’s a good video on it:

It’s either in this or another one of this guy’s videos where he echoes the growing feeling that I have been having, that single-purpose devices are a boon, and devices that have all functions mixed together often just end up in you getting all mixed up when you use then, and tumbling into needless repetitive and addictive patterns and unhappiness.

Figuring that out in the first place, and then finding the tools to climb back out of that trench seems to me like the future. Mainly because, I can’t envision us lasting and being happy with tech the way it is now. I mean, sure it’s useful, but happiness? Well-being? Are those the outcomes we get from scrolling social media, and from endlessly viewing ourselves through the collective lenses of “like/subscribe/follow?” I should say not.

Curiously, I found only *one* person out there doing a DIY attempt at a hacky conversion of a Mailbug. Maybe it’s not a great platform for hacking. I saw a bit more activity on the old Mailstation systems, but all that stuff looked beyond me and a pain in the ass.

But I like this idea, this feeling, of rejecting needless complexity. Of having an object that does a thing. And when it’s not present or active, it’s just an object you can walk away from. It’s not a “precious” that you must carry around everywhere and stroke as it illuminates your face in its deadly poison glow.

If I could get a slightly more extensible version of a device like Mailbug (like I said, Slack or a comparable replacement, Signal, Wikipedia, Blogging, News – maybe Reddit? [old reddit, that is]), in some ways, I could see giving up browsing the web for the most part (to be fair, I do watch a lot of YouTube at 3x speed too). I do a lot of browsing or “surfing” as we once called it, sure, but am I really better for all of it? A lot of it is repetitive, automatic, and in the end doesn’t get me anywhere, even though I may feel like I’m “active” when really, I’m just sitting around, wasting away, chasing flickering lights on a small reflective wall.

Who knows, maybe a single-purpose Mailbug, or something very much like it – more modern, but still intentionally limited – might be a way out of this madness. My instinct says in this direction lies freedom, and even expanded benefits from internet technologies by radically limiting how we access them.